Of the Second Kind

My friend and I were walking the track one day at PE. In the center of the track is the football field, where a few soccer players were kicking around the black-and-white ball. One of them was my friend's ex-boyfriend, with which she is still on good terms. We began to talk about him, and I found I had more to say than was appropriate to tell his ex-girlfriend, but I couldn't get it out of my head. So I wrote it down.

There are two kinds of quiet people. Some of them are quiet because they have nothing to say. Others have no one to say it to. He strikes me as the latter. He's a very private person. Even among his friends playing soccer, when he's more animated, there's still a part of him holding back. When I dumbed it down for my friend, I called it sad, but a better label would be melancholy, approaching brooding. He doesn't quite carry that quasi-emo angst so typical of the mysterious womanizer, but stops just short of it. He moves with something an ounce heavier than weightlessness. He has a careful, quiet dynamic full of eyelashes fanned out across cheeks and angled glances.

There is for certain more to him than meets the eye. For all my psychoanalyzing, I cannot claim to know him. I only wish I could get to. But for all his gentleness, the persona he plays is that of a womanizer with the inability to speak to anyone without flirting. I'm not his type, not worth the flirting--and therefore not worth speaking to at all.

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